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Legal Treatises comprises more than 21,000 works from the nineteenth — and early twentieth-centuries on British Commonwealth and American law, with 14,900 titles from the nineteenth and 7,100 titles for the years 1900 to 1926. It covers nearly every aspect of American and British Commonwealth law, encompassing a range of analytical, theoretical, and practical literature, some very rare. The monographs and materials in Legal Treatises include casebooks, local practice manuals, books on legal form, works for lay readers, pamphlets, letters, and speeches. The collection is of interest to scholars and patrons interested in domestic and international law, legal history, business and economics, politics and government, national defense, criminology, religion, education, labor and social welfare and military justice.

A legal treatise is a monograph or other writing about the law, rather than a transcript of actual laws or actual cases. To describe what legal treatises are, it is necessary to state what they are not: They are not trial transcripts, state documents, collections of laws, or judicial reports. They are secondary source materials that analyze and examine the law, usually a specific law or subject area, encompassing a range of analytical, theoretical, and practical literature.

Works from key legal thinkers including Bentham, Austin, Maine, Kent, Story and Holmes are present. The majority of the material is from the Harvard Law School Library. The collection is organized into separate units of British and American Treatises, enabling users to trace the evolution of modern law in Great Britain, Ireland and the United States

Legal Treatises is considered an essential reference collection for historical and contemporary legal studies. With a range of valuable literature from the most influential writers and key legal thinkers of the time, researchers have the resources to trace the evolution of modern law in Britain and the United States during these periods of monumental changes. These comprehensive collections from the world's foremost law libraries are now available for the first time in a fully searchable, digital format.

Nineteenth-Century Legal Treatises
The nineteenth century was a period of irrevocable economic, political and social change throughout the old and new worlds. Governments and private institutions alike struggled to come to terms with the impact of the Industrial Revolution, with the tides of social revolution and with a world torn between the promise of technology and the instability of change.

Nowhere were these changes more visible than in the legal system. In Britain, feudal concepts and procedures gave way to more modern forms. As the Industrial Revolution transformed British society, the common law began to touch a greater number of citizens. In the United States, the English legal heritage was soon transformed into the system required by the burgeoning industrial democracy.

While some roots of the common law — such as the origin of the jury system — lie further in the past, the nineteenth century is the source of many modern doctrines. The merger of law and equity and the procedural reforms in English law of this time laid to rest the old common law forms of action and permitted the growth of modern legal concepts such as property, tort, and contract.

The Industrial Revolution created new fields of law: railroads, business corporations, labor law. American individualism can be traced through many Constitutional developments. The greatest constitutional crisis of the century — the American Civil War — was the crucible from which emerged many current concepts of civil rights: due process, equal protection of the laws.

The century witnessed an explosion in legal literature. New legislators were required to cope with many aspects of modern life and the amount of case law grew by staggering proportions, particularly in the late half of the century. In 1810, only eighteen volumes of American reports had been published. By mid-century, there were 800 and by 1900 about 8,000. Lawyers and law professors increased their output of treatises (writings about the law) in order to gain an overview of the law and to cope with its complexity and rapid change.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, American lawyers had little indigenous law. They turned avidly to English text for principles. Works by Blackstone, Chitty and other English writers went through many American editions until gradually the American annotations superseded the original sources.

Legal treatises from the nineteenth century encompass the vast range of practical literature produced in the century, from Sullivan's History of the Land Titles in Massachusetts (1801) to Keasbey's Law of Electric Wires in Streets and Highways (1892). The collection contains work by the most influential writers of the time and takes the form of casebooks, local practice manuals, pamphlets, letters, trade publications, and a wide range of materials on legal and general history.

Many legal monographs were published in the century, covering every aspect of law. But the number of copies printed and circulated was often limited, and the numbers retained by libraries was even smaller. The main body of these materials is no longer available in reprints. As a result, very few law libraries, especially those founded after 1945, contain significant holdings of these materials.

Twentieth Century Legal Treatises
Carrying forward the tradition established with our Nineteenth Century Legal Treatises collection, this collection of 20th-century legal treatises through 1926 covers the most significant and influential legal writers, trends, cases and materials of the early 20th century, encompassing both U.S. and U.K. law. The addition of this portion of material was an important development for Anglo-American legal scholarship, as access to these materials in their original form was increasingly difficult for modern scholars. Drawing on the incomparable collections of the Harvard Law Library, the material permits the continuing study of legal development after the nineteenth century, and illuminates the origins of many topics that arose in the twentieth century.

Both Nineteenth Century Legal Treatises and Twentieth Century Legal Treatises are organized into 99 subject classifications. Each title is assigned a subject number from 1 to 99, based on the Harvard classification system. These 99 subject areas were subsequently reorganized into a smaller set of 42 subgroups that allowed for marketing of more coherent set of "breakouts" by categories of law. The largest numbers of titles are found in subgroups on procedural law, commercial law, constitutional law, real property, biography, criminal law, family law, taxation and public finance, administration of justice and administrative law, politics and government, and general studies in the law. But among the 99 subject classifications there are titles on every conceivable topic, including copyright, patents and trademarks, natural resources, torts, public property, religion, penology, military justice, and international law, to cite just a few.

Because Harvard University has the largest collection of American and British legal treatises, the majority of Nineteenth Century Legal Treatises came from Harvard's holdings. Yale University provided additional titles, followed by titles from York University and Columbia University. Most of the titles for Twentieth Century Legal Treatises were sourced from Harvard and Yale but 21 other institutions in the United States and Britain contributed small numbers of titles.

The collection is based on both bibliographic sources and advisor/selector recommendations. There is no one definitive bibliographic source for legal treatises; indeed, the collection may well comprise the only definitive bibliographic source of this type of material. The collection was sourced from a number of bibliographic sources, including:

Maxwell, W. Harold and Leslie F. Maxwell (comps.) A Legal Bibliography of the British Commonwealth of Nations. 2nd ed. London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1955-64, 7 vols. Currently published as Sweet and Maxwell's Legal Bibliography of the British Commonwealth of Nations. 2nd ed. London: Rees, 1989-

Sweet & Maxwell's Complete Law Book Catalogue. London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1925-1949. 7 vols.

Wallach, Kate, "The Publication of Legal Treatises in American from 1800-1830." Law Library Journal. Vol. 45. Pp. 136-48.

Parish, Jenni. "Law Books and Legal Publishing in America, 1760-1840." Law Library Journal. Vol. 72. Pp. 355-452

Cohen, Morris L. Bibliography of Early American Law. Buffalo, N.Y. : W.S. Hein & Co., 1998. 6 v.
Taylor, Betty W., and Robert J. Munro. American Law Publishing, 1860-1900. Dobbs Ferry, NY : Glanville Publications, c1984. 4 v.

These, combined with a number of key articles in the Law Library Journal by other bibliographers, all contributed to create a comprehensive road map to U.S. and British legal treatises. Key advisors to the collection included David Ferris, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Harvard Law Library; Morris L. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Law and Professional Lecturer in Law, and former Librarian of the Yale Law School Library; and Balfour Halevy, former Law Librarian at York University.